Gender and engineering: Developing actions to encourage women in tech

Abstract

There is a social and economic concern for the low representativeness of women in the technology industry. The timeline of recent years shows a drop in the interest of women in studying a career related to science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM), just when the demand labor in these fields is growing rapidly and new jobs will continue to emerge, and it is feared that they will not have enough people to cover It There are many social organizations that are taking measures to alleviate this situation, including educational branches, government agencies, industry and technological communities composed of women. In this research, the cases of industry and communities are studied. It is intended to dissect how these two ecosystems work to strengthen mechanisms that minimize the gender gap. On the one hand, the paper addresses, what are the communities, why they arise, what are their objectives, what they contribute to society and what actions they develop to contain the problem. Regarding companies, three major leaders of the sector, namely, Google, IBM and Microsoft, show their weaknesses and successes, and present development programs created to improve the internal situation in the themes of diversity and inclusion.